Can you explain more about this part of ACE’s public statement about withdrawing from the conference:
We took the initiative to contact CARE’s organizers to discuss our concern, exchanging many thoughtful messages and making significant attempts to find a compromise.
If ACE was not trying to deplatform the speaker in question, what were these messages about and what kind of compromise were you trying to reach with CARE?
In general, organizations should respect confidentiality of communications with other groups. This is especially important for ACE, as they rely on animal advocacy organizations feeling comfortable enough to share their internal data with them. While transparency is one of its primary goals, and ACE is already extremely transparent about its charity evaluation process and the reasoning that led to the selection of each of the recommended charities in its reviews, I hope you can understand why ACE also values the importance of retaining a collaborative relationship with other organizations. As such, ACE retains a strong policy against publicly sharing private communications between ACE and the charities they evaluate.
The only thing of interest here is what sort of compromise ACE wanted. What CARE said in response is not of immediate interest, and there’s certainly no need to actually share the messages themselves.
Perhaps you can understand why one might come away from this conversation thinking that ACE tried to deplatform the speaker? To me at least it feels hard to interpret “find a compromise” any other way.
[Note that I have no idea whatsoever about what actually happened here. This is purely hypothetical.]
FWIW if I was in a position similar to ACE’s here are a few potential “compromises” I would have explored. (Of course, which of these would be acceptable to me would depend on exactly why I’m concerned and how strongly, etc.) I think some of them wouldn’t typically be considered deplatforming, though I would imagine that people who are against deplatforming would find many if not all of them at least somewhat objectionable (I would also guess that some who are pro maximal deplatforming in this case would find many if not all of these objectionable):
Changing the topic of the relevant speaker’s talk
Adding a talk with a different perspective on BLM etc. to the conference program
Replacing the talk with a panel that also includes different perspectives
Removing the talk from the ‘official’ program but explicitly or implicitly allowing it to take part ‘informally’
Adding some sort of disclaimer to the talk/program saying the conference organizers are aware this is a sensitive topic and they disagree with the speaker
I could probably generate a bunch of other ideas if I spent more time generating them.
Perhaps more fundamentally, in the spirit of the ‘Harvard method’ for negotiations I wouldn’t have sent a list of demands or acceptable outcomes to CARE but would have stated my interests. I.e. roughly which properties of possible outcomes I care about. E.g. these might be things like “my staff members feel comfortable attending”, “avoiding a perception by attendees or the public that CARE, or the animal advocacy movement more broadly, are” (or even “sending a signal that CARE/the animal advocacy movement support anti-racism/BLM”), etc.
I would then encourage CARE to state their interests, and then try to make sure they and I consider the full space of possible outcomes (which includes the potential compromises listed above and many more), and work with them to see if there is any outcome in there that is acceptable to both of us.
If this went well (even if there was no deal in the end) I would imagine such a conversation would involve a lot of back-and-forth, hinge on details, and that it would be quite hard to give outsiders an accurate picture of what the parties wanted. Certainly I wouldn’t expect that “here is a list of compromises we wanted” would do a good job at this.
There is a separate question of whether even if it was possible it would be a good idea. I’m not sure. I think that on one hand various stakeholders have an interested in understanding at least roughly what interests the parties were pursuing. E.g. if I was a donor to ACE b/c I want ACE to generally maximize the effectiveness of the animal advocacy movement then I would want to know if the interests ACE was pursuing in this and similar negotiation situations were consistent with that mission. However, this may be covered by fairly general statements (e.g. the general goals and strategy of ACE) and accountability/governance mechanisms (e.g. ACE’s board holding org leadership accountable to pursuing those goals and not others in all their dealings). On the other hand, too much transparency about specifics of the conversation can easily jeopardize the parties’ ability to reach a Pareto-preferred outcome, in particular if outside observers are irrational or prefer to ‘punish’ the other party. I also think it’s generally conducive to a constructive conversation if the parties don’t have to worry that in the case of no deal the other party will try to paint them in a bad light (since such worries increase the expected cost of bargaining); and unfortunately even disclosing just what oneself said might have this effect, or at least create pressure on the other party to reveal more about their bargaining strategy. (E.g. if party A is like “we proposed X but B wouldn’t accept”, and B seems at first glance reasonable, this will create pressure on party B to explain why they thought X wasn’t acceptable, which might rely on confidential or costly-to-disclose information, etc.) It just seems like there are a bunch of tricky principal-agent and other problems to navigate here, and my impression is that certain norms of confidentiality have evolved around negotations that often seem reasonable to me (though I don’t feel highly confident, and I also don’t have a great picture of how exactly the common norms look like). I’m definitely not convinced that it would be good to create public pressure on organizations that would prevent them from entering confidential conversations with other parties in the future. If I know that you have supporters who will pressure you into disclosing what we talk about, I might prefer to not negotiate with you in the first place, and we might both be worse off as a result.
Again, I have absolutely no idea how close any of my hypotheticals are to what actually went down here.
[ETA: I wasn’t trying to comment on the object level, but for the record based on this comment by Anima International leadership staff it does sound like ACE may in fact not have approached the dispute in the way I outlined here. I’m specifically referring to claims that (1) ACE started the conversation by freezing funds and (2) them to some extent having violated strict confidentiality themselves by having disclosed that some of the ‘negotiations’ were about racism, attitudes toward DEI, etc. - I think that (2) may actually be a dynamic of the problem I pointed to, i.e., that by disclosing partial information you can create pressures on the involved parties to disclose even more information or otherwise justify their behavior. However, note that ACE may dispute these claims.
To be clear, I also think that accurately assessing such situations “from the outside” is very tricky, and I don’t think I can reasonably have a strong view on whether or not any detail such as disclosing the topic of some conversation was or wasn’t a mistake. I also think that ACE is in a particularly tricky situation when navigating such matters because it’s not some “random” actor who has a dispute with the conference organizers but also by virtue of their mission is committed to evaluating the conference organizer’s performance. I think this raises some interesting more general question about good practices for how to navigate disputes between charity evaluators and charities.]
FWIW if I was in a position similar to ACE’s here are a few potential “compromises” I would have explored.
Inferring from the list you wrote, you seem to be under the impression that the speaker in question was going to deliver a talk at the conference, but according to Eric Herboso’s top-level comment, “the facebook commenter in question would be on a panel talking about BLM”. Also, the following sentence from ACE’s Facebook post makes it sound like the only way ACE staff members would attend the conference was if the speaker would not be there at all, which I think rules out all of the compromise ideas you generated.
In fact, asking our staff to participate in an event where a person who had made such harmful statements would be in attendance, let alone presenting, would be a violation of our own anti-discrimination and anti-harassment policy.
Inferring from the list you wrote, you seem to be under the impression that the speaker in question was going to deliver a talk at the conference, but according to Eric Herboso’s top-level comment, “the facebook commenter in question would be on a panel talking about BLM”.
Yes, I had been under that impression (based on my vague memory of having heard about this situation when Buck had posted about it on Facebook). Given what Eric wrote, it sounds like you’re probably right that the “baseline plan” was a panel rather than a talk, so obviously my list of potential compromises would need to be modified (change topic of the panel, move the person from the panel to a talk on another topic, make the panel “informal” etc.). I don’t think this by itself matters much for the key points I was trying to make in my comment.
Separately, I agree that the second quote at least suggests that maybe what in fact happened was that ACE asked CARE to ban this person from even attending the conference. I haven’t followed this situation enough to have an object-level view of whether I think that would have been a reasonable/good demand. I also didn’t mean to say that the hypothetical compromises I suggested in my earlier comment would have in fact been good for the world overall.
I still think that (i) negotiation by demanding/suggesting particular outcomes (as opposed to first getting on the same page on both parties’ interests) is usually instrumentally bad even for one’s own interests [so no matter the content of the demand, if ACE’s negotiation strategy had been of that type, I’d think they probably made a mistake], (ii) confidentiality norms for specifics of negotiations are often good, would often be undermined even by disclosing just what one said oneself (i.e. without directly revealing anything the other party did or said) and (iii) while somewhat uncertain I would tentatively push back pretty strongly against outside demands to break confidentiality or outside signals that discourage an org from entering into confidential negotiations in the future
Indeed, (iii) was the main reason why I commented at all. I’m not that interested in what happens in the animal advocacy world, but I tentatively don’t want incentives that punish EA-ish orgs for utilizing dispute resolution mechanisms that involve confidentiality because I think eroding the norm that confidentiality is OK in such situations could be pretty bad.
[ETA: I wasn’t trying to comment on the object level, but for the record based on this comment by Anima International leadership staff it does sound like ACE may in fact not have approached the dispute in the way I outlined here. I’m specifically referring to claims that (1) ACE started the conversation by freezing funds and (2) them to some extent having violated strict confidentiality themselves by having disclosed that some of the ‘negotiations’ were about racism, attitudes toward DEI, etc. - I think that (2) may actually be a dynamic of the problem I pointed to, i.e., that by disclosing partial information you can create pressures on the involved parties to disclose even more information or otherwise justify their behavior. However, note that ACE may be disputing these claims.
To be clear, I also think that accurately assessing such situations “from the outside” is very tricky, and I don’t think I can reasonably have a strong view on whether or not any detail such as disclosing the topic of some conversation was or wasn’t a mistake. I also think that ACE is in a particularly tricky situation when navigating such matters because it’s not some “random” actor who has a dispute with the conference organizers but also by virtue of their mission is committed to evaluating the conference organizer’s performance. I think this raises some interesting more general question about good practices for how to navigate disputes between charity evaluators and charities.]
Can you explain more about this part of ACE’s public statement about withdrawing from the conference:
If ACE was not trying to deplatform the speaker in question, what were these messages about and what kind of compromise were you trying to reach with CARE?
In general, organizations should respect confidentiality of communications with other groups. This is especially important for ACE, as they rely on animal advocacy organizations feeling comfortable enough to share their internal data with them. While transparency is one of its primary goals, and ACE is already extremely transparent about its charity evaluation process and the reasoning that led to the selection of each of the recommended charities in its reviews, I hope you can understand why ACE also values the importance of retaining a collaborative relationship with other organizations. As such, ACE retains a strong policy against publicly sharing private communications between ACE and the charities they evaluate.
The only thing of interest here is what sort of compromise ACE wanted. What CARE said in response is not of immediate interest, and there’s certainly no need to actually share the messages themselves.
Perhaps you can understand why one might come away from this conversation thinking that ACE tried to deplatform the speaker? To me at least it feels hard to interpret “find a compromise” any other way.
[Note that I have no idea whatsoever about what actually happened here. This is purely hypothetical.]
FWIW if I was in a position similar to ACE’s here are a few potential “compromises” I would have explored. (Of course, which of these would be acceptable to me would depend on exactly why I’m concerned and how strongly, etc.) I think some of them wouldn’t typically be considered deplatforming, though I would imagine that people who are against deplatforming would find many if not all of them at least somewhat objectionable (I would also guess that some who are pro maximal deplatforming in this case would find many if not all of these objectionable):
Changing the topic of the relevant speaker’s talk
Adding a talk with a different perspective on BLM etc. to the conference program
Replacing the talk with a panel that also includes different perspectives
Removing the talk from the ‘official’ program but explicitly or implicitly allowing it to take part ‘informally’
Adding some sort of disclaimer to the talk/program saying the conference organizers are aware this is a sensitive topic and they disagree with the speaker
I could probably generate a bunch of other ideas if I spent more time generating them.
Perhaps more fundamentally, in the spirit of the ‘Harvard method’ for negotiations I wouldn’t have sent a list of demands or acceptable outcomes to CARE but would have stated my interests. I.e. roughly which properties of possible outcomes I care about. E.g. these might be things like “my staff members feel comfortable attending”, “avoiding a perception by attendees or the public that CARE, or the animal advocacy movement more broadly, are” (or even “sending a signal that CARE/the animal advocacy movement support anti-racism/BLM”), etc.
I would then encourage CARE to state their interests, and then try to make sure they and I consider the full space of possible outcomes (which includes the potential compromises listed above and many more), and work with them to see if there is any outcome in there that is acceptable to both of us.
If this went well (even if there was no deal in the end) I would imagine such a conversation would involve a lot of back-and-forth, hinge on details, and that it would be quite hard to give outsiders an accurate picture of what the parties wanted. Certainly I wouldn’t expect that “here is a list of compromises we wanted” would do a good job at this.
There is a separate question of whether even if it was possible it would be a good idea. I’m not sure. I think that on one hand various stakeholders have an interested in understanding at least roughly what interests the parties were pursuing. E.g. if I was a donor to ACE b/c I want ACE to generally maximize the effectiveness of the animal advocacy movement then I would want to know if the interests ACE was pursuing in this and similar negotiation situations were consistent with that mission. However, this may be covered by fairly general statements (e.g. the general goals and strategy of ACE) and accountability/governance mechanisms (e.g. ACE’s board holding org leadership accountable to pursuing those goals and not others in all their dealings). On the other hand, too much transparency about specifics of the conversation can easily jeopardize the parties’ ability to reach a Pareto-preferred outcome, in particular if outside observers are irrational or prefer to ‘punish’ the other party. I also think it’s generally conducive to a constructive conversation if the parties don’t have to worry that in the case of no deal the other party will try to paint them in a bad light (since such worries increase the expected cost of bargaining); and unfortunately even disclosing just what oneself said might have this effect, or at least create pressure on the other party to reveal more about their bargaining strategy. (E.g. if party A is like “we proposed X but B wouldn’t accept”, and B seems at first glance reasonable, this will create pressure on party B to explain why they thought X wasn’t acceptable, which might rely on confidential or costly-to-disclose information, etc.) It just seems like there are a bunch of tricky principal-agent and other problems to navigate here, and my impression is that certain norms of confidentiality have evolved around negotations that often seem reasonable to me (though I don’t feel highly confident, and I also don’t have a great picture of how exactly the common norms look like). I’m definitely not convinced that it would be good to create public pressure on organizations that would prevent them from entering confidential conversations with other parties in the future. If I know that you have supporters who will pressure you into disclosing what we talk about, I might prefer to not negotiate with you in the first place, and we might both be worse off as a result.
Again, I have absolutely no idea how close any of my hypotheticals are to what actually went down here.
[ETA: I wasn’t trying to comment on the object level, but for the record based on this comment by Anima International leadership staff it does sound like ACE may in fact not have approached the dispute in the way I outlined here. I’m specifically referring to claims that (1) ACE started the conversation by freezing funds and (2) them to some extent having violated strict confidentiality themselves by having disclosed that some of the ‘negotiations’ were about racism, attitudes toward DEI, etc. - I think that (2) may actually be a dynamic of the problem I pointed to, i.e., that by disclosing partial information you can create pressures on the involved parties to disclose even more information or otherwise justify their behavior. However, note that ACE may dispute these claims.
To be clear, I also think that accurately assessing such situations “from the outside” is very tricky, and I don’t think I can reasonably have a strong view on whether or not any detail such as disclosing the topic of some conversation was or wasn’t a mistake. I also think that ACE is in a particularly tricky situation when navigating such matters because it’s not some “random” actor who has a dispute with the conference organizers but also by virtue of their mission is committed to evaluating the conference organizer’s performance. I think this raises some interesting more general question about good practices for how to navigate disputes between charity evaluators and charities.]
Inferring from the list you wrote, you seem to be under the impression that the speaker in question was going to deliver a talk at the conference, but according to Eric Herboso’s top-level comment, “the facebook commenter in question would be on a panel talking about BLM”. Also, the following sentence from ACE’s Facebook post makes it sound like the only way ACE staff members would attend the conference was if the speaker would not be there at all, which I think rules out all of the compromise ideas you generated.
Yes, I had been under that impression (based on my vague memory of having heard about this situation when Buck had posted about it on Facebook). Given what Eric wrote, it sounds like you’re probably right that the “baseline plan” was a panel rather than a talk, so obviously my list of potential compromises would need to be modified (change topic of the panel, move the person from the panel to a talk on another topic, make the panel “informal” etc.). I don’t think this by itself matters much for the key points I was trying to make in my comment.
Separately, I agree that the second quote at least suggests that maybe what in fact happened was that ACE asked CARE to ban this person from even attending the conference. I haven’t followed this situation enough to have an object-level view of whether I think that would have been a reasonable/good demand. I also didn’t mean to say that the hypothetical compromises I suggested in my earlier comment would have in fact been good for the world overall.
I still think that (i) negotiation by demanding/suggesting particular outcomes (as opposed to first getting on the same page on both parties’ interests) is usually instrumentally bad even for one’s own interests [so no matter the content of the demand, if ACE’s negotiation strategy had been of that type, I’d think they probably made a mistake], (ii) confidentiality norms for specifics of negotiations are often good, would often be undermined even by disclosing just what one said oneself (i.e. without directly revealing anything the other party did or said) and (iii) while somewhat uncertain I would tentatively push back pretty strongly against outside demands to break confidentiality or outside signals that discourage an org from entering into confidential negotiations in the future
Indeed, (iii) was the main reason why I commented at all. I’m not that interested in what happens in the animal advocacy world, but I tentatively don’t want incentives that punish EA-ish orgs for utilizing dispute resolution mechanisms that involve confidentiality because I think eroding the norm that confidentiality is OK in such situations could be pretty bad.
[ETA: I wasn’t trying to comment on the object level, but for the record based on this comment by Anima International leadership staff it does sound like ACE may in fact not have approached the dispute in the way I outlined here. I’m specifically referring to claims that (1) ACE started the conversation by freezing funds and (2) them to some extent having violated strict confidentiality themselves by having disclosed that some of the ‘negotiations’ were about racism, attitudes toward DEI, etc. - I think that (2) may actually be a dynamic of the problem I pointed to, i.e., that by disclosing partial information you can create pressures on the involved parties to disclose even more information or otherwise justify their behavior. However, note that ACE may be disputing these claims.
To be clear, I also think that accurately assessing such situations “from the outside” is very tricky, and I don’t think I can reasonably have a strong view on whether or not any detail such as disclosing the topic of some conversation was or wasn’t a mistake. I also think that ACE is in a particularly tricky situation when navigating such matters because it’s not some “random” actor who has a dispute with the conference organizers but also by virtue of their mission is committed to evaluating the conference organizer’s performance. I think this raises some interesting more general question about good practices for how to navigate disputes between charity evaluators and charities.]